In 2023, BYD was busy both going to sea and intelligentizing its layout. The chip company Kunlun Core Technology has undergone a public business change recently, with BYD being one of its new shareholders.
According to Tianyancha information, the registered capital of Kunlun Core Technology has recently increased from 17.6777 million yuan to 17.8525 million yuan, with new shareholders such as BYD Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Chuangqikaiying Business Consulting Partnership (limited partnership). After completing this industrial and commercial change, BYD holds 0.33% of the equity in Kunlun Core.
BYD takes a fancy to this chip company, which was founded in June 2011 as Baidu’s Intelligent Chip and Architecture Department. Currently, Baidu is still its largest shareholder, with a shareholding ratio of 70.87%. According to the official website, Kunlun Core completed independent financing in April 2021, with a first round valuation of about 13 billion yuan. It is reported that BYD will have deeper cooperation with Kunlun Core in the future.
“The first half of new energy vehicles is electrification, and the second half is intelligent.” Wang Chuanfu once said that BYD’s layout in the intelligent field will also be the same as in the electric field, connecting all core technologies.
With the continuous improvement of the intelligent level of new energy vehicles, especially their autonomous driving ability, higher requirements have been put forward for the computational power of vehicles. This not only represents the need for automotive companies to master more advanced technology, but also means the need to meet the new supply chain security. In the past two years, one of the key words surrounding the automotive industry is “lack of power”, and the other is “lack of core”, especially high-end chips. Even now, there are still leading companies in the automotive industry that have reduced production due to lack of cores.
In recent years, BYD has made multiple investments in chips. In 2021, BYD Semiconductor invested 5 billion yuan to acquire a wafer factory, Jinan Funeng Semiconductor, and subsequently established Jinan Semiconductor. In 2022, BYD participated in investing in two DSP (digital signal processor chip) manufacturers, Jinxin Electronics and Zhongke Haoxin.
In addition, BYD has also reached cooperation with leading companies in the chip field, such as Nvidia and Horizon. According to the plan, BYD models equipped with Horizon Journey 5 will be launched as early as mid-2023. Zhengcheng 5 is the third generation of Horizon’s vehicle specification level product, with a single chip AI computing power of up to 128 TOPS. It is a large computing power chip for L4 high-level autonomous driving. The cooperation with Nvidia is also related to intelligent driving. Starting in the first half of 2023, BYD will install Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion platform on some new vehicles to achieve intelligent driving and parking of vehicles.
Through the vertical integration of three electric and other fields, BYD’s industrial advantage will be infinitely expanded in 2022, with the annual sales of 1.8635 million new energy vehicles, a year-on-year increase of more than twice. It is expected that the annual net profit will be between 16 billion yuan and 17 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than four times.
Behind this gorgeous report card is BYD’s advantages in production efficiency, cost management, and other aspects. However, intelligence is not what BYD is good at. Even among the best-selling models under BYD, its core advantage is not intelligence. In the second half of new energy vehicles, the importance of intelligence will only become higher and higher. Now, BYD is accelerating to make up for this lesson.
According to Tianyan, BYD recently applied for the registration of the “Yunnian”, “Yunnian-A”, and “Yunnian-P” trademarks. According to reports, “Yunnian” may be a fully stack self developed technology about vertical intelligent integration of new energy vehicles that BYD is about to release.
Post time: Mar-20-2023